How Partners in Crime happened
By Suneetha

About that film or music clip or ring tone that you downloaded rather than purchased legally. Have you done a criminal offence or just exercised your freedom as an individual?  Piracy in art is something many of us have been guilt of. Paromita Vohra, the well-known documentary film maker, examines this issue among others in her film Partners in Crime. Techgoss spoke to Ms.Vohra

 
Techgoss (TG): How did Partners in Crime happen? What was the inspiration behind the film?
Paromita Vohra (PV): The film was made very much from the experience and point of view of an independent artist who tries to make a living by my work. Between the extremes of copyright and copyleft, I felt that many questions about how to nurture and grow the space for independent art, and to re-present, reformulate a sense of its value in the larger atmosphere where all value is judged by large numbers and money, were falling by the wayside, unaddressed. I wanted to explore some of these questions about the value of art in society and its linked issue of livelihood.

TG: What does Partners in Crime really have as a premise?
PV: Partners in Crime looks at the way creativity functions – its associativeness, its sense of a conversation building over time and space and cultures and its importance for a happy, society where it’s also about, as Vijaydan Detha, a writer in the film says, it’s also “about the prosperity about the unconscious and creative.” From this understanding of creativity the film tries to build an understanding of the market – repudiating the rather stifling, monolithic idea of the monopolistic capitalist market, which at least in the arts, seems to be a failed model in the present technological era.

So in a way the film argues for a multiplicity of practices and a diversity of markets. It seeks to discuss a way out of the rightist religiosity about the corporate model and the puritanical interpretations of the market on the left, to reclaim an idea of many market practices, many parallel expressions of creativity all of which in a way intersect and augment each other rather than killing each other off or fighting for a supremacy over the other. The film looks at ideas of patronage, collaboration, barter, sharing, archiving, to an extent piracy and also a range of commercial models that people are using to make art and culture and knowledge accessible to more people and make a living too – closer to a Creative Commons model as lived out in life – as opposed to the rather limited and desperate stranglehold of the corporate.

In that sense the film looks at how technology in a way made this media market possible, changed the terms of how art is experienced with the coming of the printing press onwards and how technology now, with the internet and duplication, is demanding a new market model and a new understanding of how art can exist in the world.

TG: You have featured quite some 'web elements' in the film wrt IPR and the market. What part do you think the web plays in IPR violations?
PV: Many of the web elements the film looks at are how independent artists are using the web to make their livelihoods through far more open marketing means – those which bring the artist and not the marketing juggernaut to the centre of the frame. Bands like Thermal and a Quarter, Scribe Core and Demonic Resurrection for instance who market their music through the web. Similarly inclusiveplanet.com is a site devoted to making books more accessible to the reading disabled. Due to copyright law and the fact that publishers don’t see reading disabled consumers as a sufficiently profitable market, a miniscule percentage of educational and cultural material is available for people who are blind or have cerebral palsy, say. So inclusiveplanet works to change the law but also to consolidate the market into an e-commerce site that will then be opened to publishers to sell books at an equitable price. These are exciting and innovative engagements with the market which re-jig the relationship between consumers and producers which has lately become very skewed and unfair.

I’m not very interested in piracy except as an evolutionary idea – as a response to an extortionist and monopolistic media market – so there are some minor sequences about people downloading films, but not a whole lot of focus on it. Eventually is the fact that huge media corporates don’t pay writers or singers fair prices for their work and deny them a share of the profits and deny people even the freedom to sing or dance to these songs without paying for every use not piracy? The moralistic interpretation of piracy – that it is BAD – implies that the corporate is some sort of Church or God and I think that we are all agreed that this might be a deluded understanding of the world.

TG: Who is the main blogger you have profiled and how many other such bloggers are there?
PV: We’ve featured Karthik Srinivasan who runs the immensely popular and very enjoyable site itwofs.com – which looks at plagiarism in the Indian film music industry – posting the original and the copied version for comparison and discussion. Beyond the amusement of this comparison, what emerges is a very nuanced understanding of the difference between “inspired and copying.” There are songs which are inspired by others to expand the idea and feeling and others which are mechanistic copies and hence plagiarism. This sort of nuanced debate is at the heart of an intelligent copyright culture.

TG: Any IT Act connections?
PV: Only in so far as they intersect with the copyright act and the desire on the part of producers to impose draconian security measures on internet surveillance and usage – and their push to link this to the idea that piracy funds terrorism, a rather ambiguous assertion whose founding text appears to be the Rand report.

TG: What is the level of online piracy in your view?
PV: I have no idea

TG: What has been the response to the film from viewers / policy makers?
PV: People love the film. It speaks to their hearts, their common sense belief in a more open culture which allows diverse arts to flourish, to the everyday ideas of livelihood and it celebrates the notion that passion, commitment, idealism and love make the world go round too – not just money. People need to see such ideas brought to life to affirm the small voice inside, to help it be louder. That’s what we see in the fullness of their response.

TG: Whats your next project?
PV: I’m working on love and intimacy and how its changing in contemporary India as also a film about education.

Techgoss note:  Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writer and curator whose work has focuses on urban life, popular culture, gender, politics and art. Her films have been widely screened in festivals, galleries and popular screening spaces, besides being included in university syllabi around the world.

Her films as director are Partners in Crime (2011), a documentary on culture, markets and the arts Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale (2007), a documentary on tabloid TV news and moral policing(Best Short Documentary, Int.Video Fest, Trivandrum), Q2P,(2006) a film on toilets and the city (Best Documentary IFFLA and Bollywood and Beyond, Stuttgart); Where’s Sandra?(2005), a playful exploration of stereotypes of Catholic girls from a Bombay suburb; Work In Progress (2004) an impressionistic portrait of the World Social Forum held in Mumbai; Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City,(2004), a short film which explores Bombay’s cosmopolitan self image through land and food politics, which won an award for mixing fiction and non-fiction at the Digital Film Festival, Un-limited Girls (2002), a personal take on engagements with feminism in urban India (Feminist News Award, Women’s Film Festival in Seoul; Best Film Award, Aaina Film Festival, India); A Short Film About Time (2000), a fiction short about the funny-sad relationship between a young woman with a broken heart, her psychotherapist and his watch; A Woman’s Place,(1999) an hour-length documentary for PBS looking at how women in India, South Africa and the USA negotiate the space between law and custom; and Annapurna (1995), about a women food worker’s cooperative in Bombay's textile mill area.

Retrospectives of her work have been held at the Lille 3000 (2006) festival and Persistence / Resistance (2007), a festival of political documentary in India. Her films have also been screened at the Tate Modern and will feature in an upcoming exhibition at the Wellcome Art Gallery in London.

Her films as writer are the internationally released feature Khamosh Pani / Silent Waters directed by Sabiha Sumar (Golden Leopard, Locarno Film Festival, 2003, Best Screenplay, Kara Film Festival, 2003), the documentaries A Few Things I Know About Her (Silver Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival 2002), If You Pause: In a Museum of Craft, The Stuntmen of Bollywood and the faux-documentary Skin Deep (dir: Reena Mohan).

Parodevi.com has more details of her distinguished career.